The Sound of Things Falling

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My Review: To every rule its exception: This book is praised highly by a writer whose work I abhor, Jonathan Franzen; and ordinarily that means I will avoid the book so as not to read even a Pearl-Rule 46pp of something I'm bound to hate.

Literary magic of one of Latin America's most talented novelists...a masterpiece." -- Booklist, STARREDTutte queste storie, grazie al notevole talento narrativo di Juan Gabriel Vasquez, per me bellissima scoperta di quest’anno (insieme al suo conterraneo Santiago Gamboa), scaturiscono una dall’altra come acqua di fonte, in modo naturale, fresco, pressoché spontaneo, crescono, diventano narrazione collettiva, una storia genera l’altra, gemmazione affabulatoria. I hope, that issue aside, that you will all race out to your local bookeries and procure copies of this book. It's got something important to say to us in the USA about the incredibly high cost of allowing dissent to become dissolution. Colombia failed its citizens, and their agony only slowly passes. Mexico is mid-failure, and is much closer to us. And yet we allow our own idiot rebels a far freer hand in obstructing and undermining our governmental institutions and shredding our social fabric in the name of some illusory "right" they assert that they have to do this to us all. An exploration in the ways in which stories profoundly impact our lives." -- Publishers Weekly, STARRED A continuation to Sceneries (released in 2017), Sceneries II shares the same idea in capturing a imaginary natural landscape through musical means.

The Sound of Things Falling does so much at once: it’s a novel about how the U.S. dangerously influences Latin America, how the present never escapes the past, and how fragile our relationships--romantic and familial--can be. Le cose che cadono introdotte dal titolo sono un aereo passeggeri, uno di quelli grossi e affollati, che prima dell’atterraggio a Calì (Colombia) esplode perché Pablo Escobar vuole eliminare un avversario (uno dei pochi politici che non era riuscito a comprare).Haunting...Vasquez brilliantly and sensitively illuminates the intimate effects and whispers of life under siege, and the moral ambiguities that inform survival." - Cleveland Plain Dealer From the opening paragraph of The Informers, I felt myself under the spell of a masterful writer. Juan Gabriel Vásquez has many gifts—intelligence, wit, energy, a deep vein of feeling—but he uses them so naturally that soon enough one forgets one’s amazement at his talents, and then the strange, beautiful sorcery of his tale takes hold.”— Nicole Krauss In 1995, when Bogotonian Antonio Yammara was 26 and a few years out of law school, he met two significant people who would transform him, and in some ways, one would destroy him. A few years later, he met someone else that he hoped would help heal him. This is a story about the presence of the past, PTSD, grief, lives falling apart, bodies falling soundlessly. It is a story of love and hope from on high, and the crumbling and dissolution of that love and hope, the profanity of it when it runs out of fuel. The man becomes obsessed with wanting to know why his friend was killed. He learns about a secret cassette tape. His dead friend was an older man who used to be an airplane pilot and who came from a family of pilots. As he investigates, the story is interwoven with bits of true history involving recent Colombian air crashes. In one crash his friend’s wife had been killed. There are historical crashes such as one in 1938 where a daredevil pilot performing for a national patriotic celebration crashed into stands killing more than 50 spectators and almost killing the President of Colombia. (Thus the title.) Other true history is part of the story such as the zoo and hippos that drug kingpin Escobar maintained at his estate. What Vásquez offers us, with great narrative skill, is that grey area of human actions and awareness where our capacity to make mistakes,betray, and conceal creates a chain reaction which condemns us to a world without satisfaction. Friends and enemies, wives and lovers, parents and children mix and mingle angrily, silently, blindly, while the novelist uses irony and ellipsis to unmask his characters’“self-protective strategies” and goes with them– not discovering them, simply accompanying them – as they come to understand that an unsatisfactory life can also be the life they inherit.”— Carlos Fuentes